‘I’ve got nothun against Dot,’ Mrs Tyrrell protested; then in virtuous volte-face, ‘I’m not accusin’ ’er of nothun, poor cow. It’s not ’er fault. I’ll take ’er side in any showdown. Mrs Lushington ’ull think of somethun. Marcia’s on Dot’s side.’
Marcia as dea ex machina. His strength returning, he hankered less for acquaintanceship with one who was too much a legend for his present life to accommodate. She had remained inhumanly remote while his flesh-and-blood friends and allies had quarrelled over the contents of his bedpan and the techniques of lifting him on and off. Though hadn’t Marcia at least contributed the pan? Or so he had been told.
Mrs Tyrrell informed him, ‘Now that you’ve got yer strength back, love, I’m takin’ the opportunity of drivin’ inter town this week-end. Prowse is off to see some girl and ’as offered me a lift. Which I’ve accepted. I don’t doubt you can do for yerself. You’re not one of the helpless males—I can see by the way you use a needle. Anyways, I’ll bake cake enough ter see yer through, an’ all you’ll ’ave ter do is shove the blessed shoulder in the h’oven.’
He was almost too anxious to see them go. Morning and evening, using a stick, he was able by now to hobble along the river bank. More than ever his surroundings yielded quiet subtleties: a combing of cloud, a hare starting up from its nest in the tussock, a flotilla of geese rounding a bend in the river. The silly sheep, recovering from initial shock, resumed their grazing, perhaps recognising a kindred spirit.
He hobbled and clumped and hobbled, or sat when his leg gave out.
On one occasion in the days preceding Mrs Tyrrell’s week-end he came across a miserable stunted female, of lashless, red-rimmed eyes, and nostrils pinched so close together the gristle could barely have allowed the passage of air. Seated on a rock beside the river she averted her face from his approach, holding her head at a discouraging angle.
He knew at once, but had to ask, ‘And who are you?’
‘I’m Dot,’ she replied unwillingly. ‘Dot Norton. I help at the house. You’re Mr Twyborn,’ she said. ‘They was talkin’ about you.’
‘What were they saying?’
‘Oh, I dunno—yer leg,’ she gulped and sniffed, ‘yer dad. They’re talkin’ about askin’ you up.’
‘People don’t always do what they talk about doing.’
‘That’s somethun you don’t need to tell me!’ said Dot Norton.
She started re-arranging her dress over the early months of a pregnancy. She was the kind of runt whose last phase would be huge. He decided he’d better not look at her.
‘Look at these geese,’ he said. ‘Have they gone wild, or are they still domesticated?’
‘Eh?’
‘Do they belong at the homestead?’
‘Not as you’d say,’ said Dot Norton. ‘They’re not exactly wild neether. They’re old,’ she said. ‘They lay soft eggs and nothun ever comes out.’
She turned on him a look which expressed envy of the luck of elderly geese.
‘I wish I was barren,’ she said very earnestly.
‘If you were, you mightn’t.’
He did sincerely believe it for that instant: to be rent between birth and death was the luxury of normal women.
It was obvious they had discussed life too deeply, for Dot grew prim.
‘I better be goin’. Scrape the bloody parsnips,’ she said, ‘or Mrs Quimby ’ull rouse on me.’
She stood up, pulling down a crumpled woollen dress over her increasing baby.
‘Don’t worry, Eddie,’ she told him. ‘Mrs Lushington means to invite yer—and soon.’
He hobbled back to the cottage.
‘Where’ve you been, you little bastard?’ Mrs Tyrrell asked.
‘Along the river.’
‘It’s too late for invalids along the river. An’ Mrs Edmonds come lookun for yer with this.’
She produced one of the coarse tumblers with which the cottage was provided, and in one of which her Sunday teeth spent the rest of the week. But aslant this particular glass reclined a single, white, wintry rose, possibly the last rose ever, its invalid complexion infused with a delicate transcendent green.
Against the tumbler Mrs Tyrrell rather coyly propped an oblong parchment envelope which in no way went with her own blackened hand and the huggermugger little dining-kitchen in which they were standing.
As he tore through the envelope, he saw she was watching, but overtaken by recklessness he could not care, nor for what she might read on his face as he read.
Dear Eddie,
You may wonder why I haven’t been in touch before. It could be from laziness—or diffidence—I’m really quite a shy person. But now that we’re over whatever it was, Greg and I would love you to come to a meal this Saturday night, when we understand you will be on your own. About 7, shall we say?
Sincerely,
Marcia Lushington
This last of our roses is a token of I don’t know what. There is nothing else I can offer. Do, please, forgive my earlier omissions.
He left the kitchen without offering to share the contents of his letter, and Peggy Tyrrell must have felt she ought to respect his decision.
No doubt it was his silence which provoked her superiority as the time approached for her departure to town. Long before the driver showed up, she jumped into the passenger’s seat, clutching an irregular brown-paper parcel, sucking her green, week-end teeth, lolled in the high-standing Ford and looked out with an expression which suggested ‘if you have your mysteries, I can have mine’ from under a great black hat, constructed rather than made, out of stiff, dusty ribbon. Except for the battered brick-red face she was a vision of total black. It was her normal going-out dress, though on this occasion she was looking forward to a funeral of some importance. If the late mayor happened to have been both a Protestant and a swindler, Peggy Tyrrell was never known to let moral scruples stand between herself and her favourite form of entertainment. ‘Besides’, as she was fond of saying, ‘if you’re born with morals yerself, it’s up ter you to forgive the poor bugger ’oo wasn’t’—a precept she didn’t always obey.
Now while Mrs Tyrrell sat waiting, serenely, if mysteriously, in the car, Eddie, lying on his bed beneath the vantage window, could hear the manager endlessly buffing his town boots. The preparations for this expedition were unusually elaborate. In the intervals between the roaring, the pounding, the explosions of the chip-heater, which shook the unstable cottage’s whole structure, there was the sound of a razor painfully dragged through a three-day stubble. Then the thrashing and splashing of water, the thumping and grazing of large limbs coming to terms with a narrow metal tub.
Prowse showed up unexpectedly before putting on his shirt.
‘If you ever feel like it, Ed,’ he announced from the doorway, ‘there’s plenty of hot little sorts in town. Let me know and I’ll fix up something for yer.’
Eddie thanked his would-be procurer, who had advanced some way into the room.
Prowse was at his most ostentatiously virile, in faded moleskins and heavy, conspicuously polished boots, a generous golden fell wreathed round the nipples of the male breasts. He stood looking down at the passive figure before him on the bed. The thick arms looked strangely powerless, and the smile which accompanied his invitation to lust, directionless, and finally evasive.
Eddie let Prowse withdraw without helping him by remark or glance. In fact, he turned his face, and was staring at the side wall from under half-lowered lids. He felt as powerless and evasive as Prowse had looked. If he had spoken he might not have been able to control his breathing.
‘See you tomorrow night then,’ the manager called as he slammed the fly-proof door and thundered over the veranda.
The car was heard driving off.
Alone in the house, Eddie was possessed by a sensation of freedom from the need to control his more obsessive desires. Contingency was no longer a threat. On his visit to the Lushingtons, one of whom he hardly knew, the other not at all, he wo
uld have every opportunity for impressing strangers with the self which, he felt sure, was in process of being born, and which was the reason he had chosen a manner of life on the whole distasteful to him.
Till the image of Dot Norton was inserted into his mind to start his conviction wobbling. The tearful undersized girl nursing her pregnancy by the river, unhappy in her possession—but possessed. Her figure fading into the vision of brute arms, nipples wreathed in a fuzz of gold. Into Marcia Lushington’s nostrils breathing cigarette smoke from under a fringe of monkey fur.
He got up as quickly as his lameness allowed, re-read the letter of invitation, looked in the glass at the reflection of his personally unappealing face. The rest of the afternoon he spent imitating Prowse’s preparations for the week-end orgy at Woolambi, except that he devoted all often minutes to filing and buffing his nails, an occupation in which Don would never have indulged. Or would he? The surprises other people can spring are all the more surprising for being unimaginable.
Don. Only rarely had he addressed Prowse by his first name, and it entered his thoughts just as rarely. It had the same brashness, brassiness of tone, as the man himself, not without appeal. Marcia on the other hand conveyed the opulent ripple of soft, creamy flesh, the penetrating scent of an exotic flower unrelated to the delicate accents of the greenish-white winterbound rose.
As the hour for their dinner approached he lit the hurrican lamp. He considered whether to take his stick, which by now he scarcely needed for physical support, then decided on it, more in the nature of a theatrical prop. He was wearing a suit made for him in London after he had been demobbed. Looking at the reflection in the glass he had begun to convince himself of an existence which most others seemed to take for granted.
He could not be sure whether Prowse did, just as he would probably never believe wholly in his own positive attributes—if what is masculine is also necessarily positive.
As often happens in the approach to an Australian country house, it was difficult to decide where to breach the Lushington homestead. There were verandas, porches, lights, snatches of piano music, whinging dogs, skittering cats, archways armed with rose-thorns, a drift of kitchen smells, but never any real indication of how to enter. Australian country architecture is in some sense a material extension of the contradictory beings who have evolved its elaborate informality, as well as a warning to those who do not belong inside the labyrinth.
After blundering around awhile he was finally admitted by the fresh-faced Mrs Edmonds, wife of the groom-cum-dairyman-cum-gardener. Herself who aired Mrs Lushington’s furs, and who had brought the invalid white rosebud down to the cottage.
She said, ‘They’re expecting you, sir, in the droring room.’ She was too shy or too untrained to go farther than indicate the direction in which the room lay.
He might have blundered some more if it hadn’t been for light visible in a doorway at the end of the passage and a few groping piano chords of musical comedy origin. The piano act, he suspected, was staged by Mrs Lushington to lure him in.
In fact it was her husband brooding over the piano.
‘Vamping a bit,’ old Lushington explained with a bashful smile. ‘It helps pass the time.’
Leaving the piano, he advanced and asked, ‘What’s your poison, Eddie?’ as though he might rely on alcohol to dissolve human restraints.
Lushington himself, still wearing leggings and cord breeches below a balding velvet smoking-jacket, was already comfortably oiled. ‘You’re well, are you?’ he asked. ‘You look well.’
Eddie was prevented answering either of his host’s questions by the entrance of a little yapping Maltese terrier with a delicious sliver of a pink tongue who proceeded to skip around, blinded by his own eyebrows, excited by his own frivolity.
The guest spilled a finger of what smelled like practically neat whiskey as the dog’s mistress appeared.
‘We haven’t met,’ Mrs Lushington said, ‘but I know you, of course, from the Hotel Australia.’
‘How the Australia?’ her husband asked in some surprise.
‘On an occasion when I decided not to lunch there,’ she answered. ‘It all looked too bloody—like some awful club, full of the people one spends one’s life avoiding. Too much flour in everything—and a smell of horseradish.’
Mr Lushington looked perplexed. ‘But we’ve always enjoyed the old Australia. You run into so many of your mates. And you, Marce, have never found anything wrong with the food.’
But Mrs Lushington was holding out. She raised her chin, and smiled. Like Peggy Tyrrell she enjoyed her mysteries, while being more than half prepared to share them with one who was not quite a stranger, but almost.
‘Stop it, Beppi!’ she advised the Maltese, who was chivvying the fur with which she was hemmed.
‘Darling,’ she asked her husband, ‘are you going to pour me a drink?’
As Greg Lushington was too deeply immersed in the mystery of his wife’s betrayal of the Hotel Australia, she advanced and did it for herself with a most professional squirt from a siphon covered with wire-netting.
Marcia was wearing a long coat of vivid oriental patchings over her discreet black, less discreetly sable-hemmed, skirt. It was in the upper regions that discretion ended completely, in an insertion of flesh-coloured, or to match Marcia, beige lace which strayed waist-wards in whorls and leaves. Her daring must have deserted her in dressing, for she had stuck an artificial flower in the cleavage of lace or flesh, a species of oriental poppy artistically crushed, its flesh-tones tinged with departing flame.
‘Do sit,’ she invited their guest, ‘if you can see somewhere comfortable. Other people’s furniture, like their coffee, is inclined to be unbearable.’
The Lushingtons’ drawing-room furniture was a mixed lot: armchairs and sofa in the chintzy English tradition, with a few pieces of what looked like authentic Chippendale, and rubbing shoulders with them, humbler colonial relations in cedar, crudely carved by some early settler, or more likely, his assigned slave.
There was also the grand piano at which Mr Lushington had been discovered vamping, on it a Spode tureen filled with an arrangement of dead hydrangeas, autumn leaves, and pussy willow, in front of it, framed importantly in gold, a portrait-photograph of a younger Marcia, one hand resting possessively on what must have been the same piano, draped at the time with a Spanish shawl.
Noticing their jackeroo’s interest in pianos, Mrs Lushington asked, ‘Do you play?’
‘I used to,’ he said, ‘badly, I was told, but my enthusiasm made me acceptable.’
‘Greg is the musical one,’ nor did Mrs Lushington resent it. ‘He’ll thump quite happily by the hour. I tried as a child, but my chilblains didn’t encourage me to practise. I think a piano’s necessary, though—as part of a room, to stand things on.’
Her husband, who had flopped down in a rickety cedar grandmother chair, continued bemused by her recent remark, or else it was his most recent whiskey. ‘I can’t think what makes you say that about the old Australia.’
‘Oh, darling, leave it! It’s only that one isn’t the same person every hour of the week.’
She was prepared to laugh for her own conceit, when her little dog, jumping from the sofa to her lap, darted his tongue between her opening lips, and incipient mirth was replaced by barely controlled annoyance.
‘I like to think I’ve been the same person,’ Mr Lushington said, ‘every hour of my life.’
After smacking her naughty dog, Mrs Lushington was again disposed for laughter.
‘I know you do,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes you adorable.’ Getting up, she went behind his chair and, bending over, kissed him on the crown of his bald head. ‘Don’t you think he’s rather sweet?’ she asked.
Eddie was relieved to gather that her question was rhetorical. His own affection for the old man was too delicate to bear exposure.
For all her affectation of lightness and mirth, Marcia Lushington revealed glimpses of a more sombre temperame
nt. Where her black, rather coarse, glistening eyebrows almost met, there were flickering hints that black frowns were the order of her day. Unlike so many other women, she had not yet cut off her hair, which was arranged with some skill and tortoiseshell combs in a chignon above the nape of her neck. Though substantially built, height and flowing lines helped her to get away with it; full lips were only faintly painted the colour of scallop-coral, beneath a too heavy Caucasian moustache; overall, the raw-scallop tones would have made her flesh look unduly naked if it had not received the benefit of powder. Her regrettable feature would have been her teeth if they hadn’t looked so durable: they were strong, but too widely spaced, and in the moments of her assured mirth, bubbles would appear in the gaps.
Her eyes were fine and dark—none of your blistering Anglo-Saxon blue.
During the evening Eddie remembered what Prowse had said about Marcia’s being ‘more of the land’. He might not have agreed had he not experienced the vast undulating Monaro, and if, on the way to dinner, he had not brushed against an old natural-wool cardigan hanging from a hook under a hat in stained, dead-green velour. These very personal belongings had the smell of tussock and greasy fleece, which gusts from Marcia’s Chanel temporarily overpowered.
In the mock-Tudor dining room, mint sauce took over from Chanel. Greg Lushington stood at the sideboard carving the leg like a surgeon under hypnosis.
There was no nonsense about the Lushingtons’ feeding habits.
‘Do you approve, darling?’ he asked. ‘The gravy isn’t too floured, is it?’
‘Shut up, Greg!’ she returned. ‘It was a mood, that’s all.’
Mrs Edmonds who was waiting on them smiled for what she did not understand, while through a hatch there was the suggestion of a suetty face (Mrs Quimby? relations with whom Peggy Tyrrell had severed) and the pinched, rabbity features of Dot Norton the rabbiter’s daughter above a wet floral apron.
The Lushingtons started eating their way through the slices of mutton, the roasted potatoes, the baked pumpkin, the wads of bicarbonated cabbage. They obviously enjoyed the feudal glory in which they lived.
The Twyborn Affair Page 22